In today's world, cellular networks provide on-demand communications capabilities to individuals and business entities. Typically, a cellular network is wireless network that can be distributed over land areas, which are called cells. Each such cell is served by at least one fixed-location transceiver, which is referred to as a cell site or a base station. Each cell can use a different set of frequencies than its neighbor cells in order to avoid interference and provide guaranteed bandwidth within each cell. When cells are joined together, they provide radio coverage over a wide geographic area, which enables a large number of mobile telephones, and/or other wireless devices or portable transceivers to communicate with each other and with fixed transceivers and telephones anywhere in the network. Such communications are performed through base stations and are accomplished even if when mobile transceivers are moving through more than one cell during transmission. Major wireless communications providers have deployed such cell sites throughout the world, thereby allowing communications mobile phones and mobile computing devices to be connected to the public switched telephone network and public Internet.
A mobile telephone is a portable telephone that is capable of receiving and/or making telephone and/or data calls through a cell site or a transmitting tower by using radio waves to transfer signals to and from the mobile telephone. In view of a large number of mobile telephone users, current mobile telephone networks provide a limited and shared resource. In that regard, cell sites and handsets can change frequency and use low power transmitters to allow simultaneous usage of the networks by many callers with less interference. Coverage by a cell site can depend on a particular geographical location and/or a number of users that can potentially use the network. For example, in a city, a cell site can have a range of up to approximately ½ mile; in rural areas, the range can be as much as 5 miles; and in some areas, a user can receive signals from a cell site 25 miles away.
The following are examples of some of the digital cellular technologies that are in use by the communications providers: Global System for Mobile Communications (“GSM”), General Packet Radio Service (“GPRS”), cdmaOne, CDMA2000, Evolution-Data Optimized (“EV-DO”), Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (“EDGE”), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (“UMTS”), Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (“DECT”), Digital AMPS (“IS-136/TDMA”), and Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (“iDEN”). The Long Term Evolution, or 4G LTE, which was developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) standards body, is a standard for a wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. LTE is based on the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA digital cellular technologies and allows for increasing capacity and speed by using a different radio interface together with core network improvements.
Cell site are typically connected to core networks, which provide connections to the Internet, for example, via backhaul connections. Backhaul connections handle a significant amount of data traffic that flows to and from the cell site to the core network. This can slow down data transfer rate over the backhaul connections and thus, cause slow down and/or interruption of data delivery to user equipment (e.g., mobile telephones, data terminals, etc.). To improve speed and/or quality of as well as reduce operational and/or capital costs associated with backhaul connections, such connections are typically optimized. Various conventional solutions exist for such optimizations. These include a radio access network (“RAN”) offload solution and a content redundancy elimination solution.
The RAN offload solution is offered by many network providers. This solution allows for reduction of backhaul cost by branching out streams of data to-and-from the cell site, and transporting the offloaded traffic via lower cost links, e.g. DSL. However, this solution is deficient as it requires offloading traffic to an uncontrolled link e.g., DSL, without any quality of service (“QoS”) guarantee. Other existing backhaul optimization solutions in the market employ simple bit-level redundancy elimination techniques. These solutions lack the application-based intelligent operation capabilities in terms of data traffic analysis and typically introduce another node (i.e., point of failure) in the backhaul connection. Additionally, these solutions cannot perform header compression, content pre-positioning, and analytics based content pre-fetching. Thus, there is a need to provide a wireless communication system that is capable of providing an efficient, cost-effective and reliable transmission of data on the backhaul connection.